In medical sites, a wide variety of medical information is generated, including waveform information, such as electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, and the like, numerical information, such as blood pressures, body temperatures, and the like, and textual information, such as various examination reports, medical records, and the like, as well as image information obtained by various modalities, such as CT, MRI, US, PET, and the like.
For example, in the case of endoscopic examination, various types of endoscopes according to regions of a subject are available, such as bronchoscope, gastrointestinal endoscope, thoracoscope, arthroscope, and the like, whereby various endoscopic images are obtained, and endoscopic examination reports which include findings of the obtained endoscopic images and the like are generated. Further, if pixel values are projected by a central projection method with three-dimensional volume data obtained by CT or the like as input, a virtual endoscopic image representing inside of a subject observed by a virtual endoscope may be obtained. The generated endoscopic image is used for image diagnosis and image interpretation report is generated.
Some medical institutions have established a system for managing such medical information. For example, such medical information is stored in a database as electronic data, then medical information desired by a user is selected in response to a request from a client terminal, and the selected information is displayed on a display device connected to the client terminal.
In order to improve the operability of selection and display of such medical information, various user interfaces are proposed. For example, such a user interface is known as described, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-080969 in which, when selecting a given region of a patient, the user is allowed to select a broad region from a GUI using a human body icon displayed on a display device to display detailed region information on the display device and to select a desired detailed region from the displayed detailed region information.
Further, another user interface is known as described, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-119000 in which the user is allowed to draw a reference line in an axial cross-sectional image by a touch operation using an input device having a touch screen display connected to and used with a medical image processing workstation and, when drawn, a coronal cross-sectional image with the reference line as the cutting plane is generated and displayed.